Receiving assistance from children is a common experience of later life. Recent scholarship describes the functioning of intergenerational assistance networks, and specifies concerns voiced by assistance donors and recipients. However, little is known about variables related to these concerns; existing data suggest that characteristics of older people and their families are associated with aged parents' views of children's assistance. The goals of this project are to (1) identify characteristics of older individuals and their families which significantly predict older peoples' evaluations of assistance from children, and (2) compare predictors for older and younger elderly people. More generally, the project is designed to gather information helpful in identifying older people who encounter problems in receiving family support, and who are thus in special need of extrafamilial assistance in order to maintain independent functioning. A cross-sectional design including two age groups (65-74; 75-90) will be used; respondents will be Caucasian middle and lower middle class community residents. Two phases of interviews will be conducted. First, 20 respondents (10 per age group) will participate in semi-structured interviews in which they describe their family structure, help exchanged with children, their evaluations of this assistance, and their demographic background. These interviews will be tape recorded and transcribed; content analysis will be performed on interview transcripts. Next, structured interviews will be conducted with 200 respondents (100 per age group) in order to quantify family structure, help exchanged with children, evaluations of this assistance, and demographic background. Structured interview responses will be analyzed using multiple regression and discriminant function and analyses in order to identify characteristics significantly related to evaluations of assistance; separate sets of analyses will be performed for each age group in order to compare variable relationships for younger and older elderly people.